That was the week that was...

This week has had me at an Elementary school (6-11) every day and I love it. It's completely exhausting, playing games with hundreds of excitable tinies, but they make you feel so appreciated. Almost as a postscript to my last entry, this week I've come home with two bags of origami and half a bottle of okonomiyaki sauce.

The students are curious, enthusiastic, optomistic and not beset by the hormonal bugbears that teenagers suffer. My greetings at the start of each lesson are met with a colossal barrage of radiant shouts, preferable by far to the semi-articulate grunts I receive at Junior High.

Even amongst elderly Japanese, gaijin are something of a curiosity. The great thing about meeting very young children, is that you don't have to deal with all the pre-conceptions they've gained by the time they become adults, and their spirit of discovery is still fresh. Topics such as the colour of my eyes, my height or shoe size, the simplest revelations, provoke a classroom sized exclamation of wide eyed incredulity.

One of the best parts about the job is tricking children into learning something by playing games with them. This week for example, I've been teaching directions. First I teach the vocabulary using mime and rudimentary Japanese, then we launch into a game, whereby a blindfolded student has to listen to directions from their friends in order to find a ball and bash it with a stick. Just as much fun as it sounds and incredibly noisy.

I've pondered previously on what happens to these joyous characters to turn them into the little toe-rags I spend most of my time with. One girl in particular, when I first met her, was a model student, motivated, enthusiastic, competent and a delight to work with. Recently, although still pleasant to randomly bump into, she's the very antithesis of the student she was...listen to me, old git.

Moving swiftly on, thanks to everybody who left me a birthday comment. We went out to Tokyo in pursuit of 200 yen beers (£1 roughly, proceed with caution) and a punk night, which was like being back in Hawthornes, but relentlessly good fun, ending in a whimsical with cash taxi trip back to Kawasaki, granting us (well, me, as Hayley was asleep on my knee) the sights of Tokyo at some absurd hour in the morning. The rest of the weekend has been a cosy indoor affair, complete with cake (in the shape of a giant shrimp sushi), senbei and the complete series of Black Adder...Happy Birthday to me indeed...